Interim Solution for May 2009 Go Live

Today is an important day for the Management to make a decision on the moving forward plan for May 2009 and full-fetch plan for the generic solution.  The issue of the problem has not yet tackled on the possibility of implementing the interim solution for Korea.  No doubt, we need to implement the same solution for Korea in order to keep in sync with the regional plans and to avoid double works from the limited resources that we have right now.

First thing we need to do is to re-establish the project organization for the project, to ensure each country has an accountability to monitor and track the project’s progress in this tight time line.  The issue I am worried is more of Korea as they do not have the necessary resources to track and perform project management activities.  Probably that has to leave to the country director to understand and establish the alignments and understandings of their involvements in the coming months.  Next step is to engage the web service’s development team to work towards the revised project plan to develop this component of the solution ready by February 2009 at all means.  Looking at the plan, we are on track and definitely to push for earlier completion so that the other teams have more time to understand and perform unit testings before the joint testing with Customer in early March 2009.

As for the solution design for interim solution, we are to come up the agreed concept before Christmas eve and the whole team is to work together to share and advise the best, effective approach to reach this target.  Lots of work for us to work on before the Christmas break!

Post-moterm: Workshop in Australia

I was in Sydney for the past 2 weeks to discuss on the generic Warehouse Management solution.   The agenda of the workshop changed when the discussion went onto covering commercial aspects of the project and it didn’t serve the purpose to these participants from the Customers (2 from Operations, 1 from Logistics) to make any decisions at that point.

I, myself from the regional team, went through the country’s business requirements from Customer.  The difficulties we faced was we did not have any internal business requirements or “To-Be processes” from our country’s operations on how to manage the new enhancements from Customer.  It was a total mess and the project manager was leaving the Organisation in couple of days and nothing was established within the team to discuss the move-forward plan for documentations.

Sitting down with my system analyst, we went through every single paragraph on the Customer BRD together with Korea to understand where are the similarities for both and identifying the core functionality for robustness and scalability for future enhancements and new deployments for new sites.  The high level, estimated time-line for the availability of the solution is planned for next December 2009 with the considerations of the complexity and ongoing issues that we are facing at this moment.  The Management did not like the plan as this was taking too long to develop and get ready for the requirements for the upcoming RFQs with the Cusotmer.  The teams were dismayed and objected to unrealistic comments, scope-down of the requirements to achieve this timeline as the problem we faced was more than just the complexity of the solution.  Human resources, required documents and analysis are to take care of to meet that timelines.  Last week, we sit down and look into the customer’s needs for the next 4 months’ deployments, working out several alternatives to achieve April 2009 go-live and iterative developments for December 2009.

Right now, it is up to the Steering Commitee to make their final decisions and going forward for the project in the next few days.